City of Sin: London and its Vices - Brossura

Book of the Week: 'What is clear from reading Arnold's hugely entertaining sex tour of London is that the capital now is not some latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah, as moralists would have us belive, but a far more wholesome place than it has ever been in its history. ... Arnold ... is a delightful travelling companion through the centuries of the city of sin' Jeanette Winterson, Times 14/8
'...fascinating and colourful' ... a lively affirmation of sexual desire in all its varieties' Observer 15/8
‘Cambridge graduate and local councillor Catharine Arnold recalls her past as a high-class West End escort in the ‘golden age’ of the 1980s’
Interview, Sunday Times News Review 25/7
CITY OF SIN by Catharine Arnold
‘Welcome to the world of rakes, pimps and the debauched aristocracy.  City of Sin provides a romp through London’s history at a cracking pace, covering every disreputable person we know, with most of the English kings and queens thrown in for good measure...The book covers all the essentials – the Southwark stews, Ranelagh and Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, Covent Garden brothels, as well as a quick peek inside Mother Clap’s molly-house with its cavorting homosexuals.  For a general reader this is a fun read....a great pick-me-up’
Waterstone’s Books Quarterly July issue
 
‘...there’s plenty to get stuck into here.  Arnold arranges her formidable research lucidly, showing us how to abused sex slaves of the Roman era were supplanted by medieval and Tudor whores, Victorian streetwalkers and 20th-century call girls.  She is good on the way legislators have sought haplessly to regulate sex, form Henry VIII’s statue against buggery to the current Policing and Crime Act.  All the usual sexual suspects – Pepys, Wilde, DH Lawrence, Christine Keeler – are given their due.  But she’s also alive to eye-catching incidental characters such as the medieval prostitute Clarice la Claterballock or the Victorian pornographer with the prophetic name Hankey.  Amid familiar material about flogging and buggery inculcated at public schools, she also records the first documented case of auto-erotic asphyxiation; from 1791...The book’s brevity stops it getting boring.  And I suppose none of us can keep it up forever’
Evening Standard 5/8
 
‘It is the third in a trilogy of lively London histories by Catharine Arnold, the others being on death and madness.  In each, she leads us briskly through her theme – “vice” here translating mainly as “sex”.  To pack 2000 years of the stuff into less than 400 pages is a challenge, but Arnold achieves it admirably...We meet characters such as Victorian collector Henry Spencer Ashbee, who left 15,299 items of pornography to the British Museum and obliged that august institution to take them as a condition of also getting his valuable Cervantes editions, an the inventor Chace Pine, who designed an ingenuous machine that could whip forty people at once.  Arnold ends upliftingly, with Andrew Marvell’s “Ode to his Coy Mistress”.  Marvell urges his love to live for present pleasure, rather than clinging to virtues destined to wither and rot in the grave. “Now let us sport us while we may,” he says.  It is a fitting epigraph for a story in which simple human libido and exuberance keep London’s streets alive’
Independent 13/8
‘She has gathered a wealth of artistic and literary references, some of which are reproduced as illustrations, adding to the impression that the reader has opened a cabinet of curiosities: often titillating, sometimes shocking, frequently entertaining...the book is a lively affirmation of sexual desire in all its varieties’
New Review, Observer 15/8
‘...richly detailed book...the characters who enliven the pages of this engaging survey of sex and the city would no doubt all have met with disapproval of Richard of Devizes but they do make entertaining reading’
The Sunday Times 15/8
‘...hugely entertaining...city of sin is full of useful bawdy information...Arnold is never judgemental, and is a delightful travelling companion through the centuries of the city of sin, pointing out the sites, and leaving us to understand the despair and the hypocrisy, as well as the pleasure, that inevitably seems to surround sex’
Jeanette Winterson, The Times 14/8
'From Roman slave girls who arrived chained and shivering at the dockyards at Queenhithe to the exploits of call-girl Belle de Jour in the 21st Century, Catharine Arnold takes her readers on a galloping ride through two millennia of sinful exploits in London...With a keen eye for detail and unfrilly prose, Arnold brings alive the whole spectrum of sin in London, from eccentric Victorian cross-dressers to frivolous girls and joyous sex'
Mail on Sunday 21/11
‘From Roman slave girls who arrived chained and shivering at the dockyards at Queenhithe to the exploits of call-girl Belle de Jour in the 21st Century, Catharine Arnold takes her readers on a galloping ride through two millennia of sinful exploits in London...With a keen eye for detail and unfrilly prose, Arnold brings alive the whole spectrum of sin in London, from eccentric Victorian cross-dressers to frivolous girls and joyous sex’
Mail on Sunday 21/11
'Is London sexy? Catharine's Arnold's sexual history of the capital begins when Southwark was the "Las Vegas of Londinium", but very soon we have exchanged the slave girls of Roman London for the medieval prostitutes of Gropecunt Lane, and then around 1500 the pox arrives and everyone has painful syphilitic buboes...'
The Guardian 14/5

Catharine Arnold read English at Cambridge and holds a further degree in psychology. A journalist, academic and popular historian, Catharine's previous books include the novel "Lost Time", winner of a Betty Trask award. Her London trilogy for Simon & Schuster comprises of "Necropolis: London and Its Dead", "Bedlam, London and Its Mad" and (to be published August 2010) "City of Sin, London and Its Vices".